


Screaming truth will be spoken

by TwilightLegacy13



Category: The Witchlands Series - Susan Dennard
Genre: (not graphic), Angst, Gen, One Shot, Past Torture, Post-Betrayal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29707137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwilightLegacy13/pseuds/TwilightLegacy13
Summary: In the Orhin Mountains after Mathew and Habim's betrayal, Safi realizes that it isn't as easy as just reminding them that rabbits still matter.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 3





	Screaming truth will be spoken

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from "Greyhound" by Ashton Irwin - I felt like this line fit, along with a lot of the animal imagery in the song. This isn't a long fic but I'm proud of how it turned out. I hope you all like it!
> 
> Content warnings: References to past torture, discussion of death.

Safi was grateful when the Hell-Bards quickened their pace to go ahead and scout, briefly leaving them behind. It gave her an opportunity that she was ashamed of needing, to catch her breath from more than just the altitude. These three people, in spite of how they had met, were her friends now and she was grateful that they had made it out of the mountain alive and mostly intact.

Which was why guilt twisted through her gut when Safi realized that, at least for the moment, it pained her to look at them. She couldn’t see Caden without seeing him chained to a dungeon’s stone wall, couldn’t see Lev without seeing the tear tracks along her face from what the Adders had done to her, couldn’t see Zander without seeing him flushed and breathless after escaping a building full of fire.

The shame coiled even deeper when she pinpointed the source of it. Her discomfort from looking at the Hell-Bards wasn’t because she could not bear to remember the suffering they had been through, and neither was it because they were about to head into a situation that could be just as dangerous. No, it hurt to look at any of the Hell-Bards because it hurt to think of the person who had subjected them to that pain. The person who had done it for Safi, and who had known she didn’t want it, and who hadn’t cared.

Safi could deal with a thousand kinds of betrayals— _did_ deal with the rising tide of lies every day—but not Habim’s. Her parents hadn’t lived long enough for her to know them, so he had been the closest thing she had to a father for years and years. Aside from him and Mathew, she didn’t have much experience with how fathers were supposed to work, but she always thought they were supposed to provide a home and the comfort of knowing that you would never be hurt there.

Sometimes, she supposed, it wasn’t even a typical home. Sometimes home was a temporary place of refuge or a coffee shop where you knew you were always welcome. No matter where the family stayed, though, her little vision had stayed the same. Fathers weren’t supposed to be the ones who hurt you.

It was a good thing that Safi was, for once, keeping her thoughts to herself instead of shouting them to the sky, and an even better thing that the Hell-Bards were out of earshot. She knew that Zander would say well-meaning things that didn’t help, Lev would say unintentionally backhanded things that still didn’t, and Caden would call her a hopeless fool for daring to believe the best of people. Maybe it made her narrow-minded or even lucky, but Safi had never thought it would be foolish to put her trust in the two people she always thought she could.

She’d promised herself not to think about those three whenever she could help it, for as long as it reminded her of the cells in Azmir, but it wasn’t the kind of thing she could control. Not when she could already hear their words so clearly, especially Caden’s. Gods below, he gave the most awful advice, but Safi was starting to think that his might be the truest. And she _hated_ that Mathew and Habim were the ones making her so cynical.

But of course, Safi wasn’t the only one they had harmed.

Iseult had begun speaking to her, telling a story about what had happened while she was in the small town of Tirla. This was the one person she knew she could always rely on, and who would never hurt her, so she shoved aside the rest and listened to her Threadsister.

Until Iseult mentioned a coffee shop with a familiar sign that made her throat burn as if the ice from the mountains was caught there. Because Iseult still didn’t know that the owner of that shop had been hiding things from the start, keeping the kind of secrets that got empresses killed and wars rekindled. She spoke of the shop with fondness that coated even the tones of frustration when she mentioned the note that had been left for her there, as Iseult was still certain that it had been to help her. Always to help.

Mathew’s name sent a needle through Safi’s heart, a sharp stab of anguish like the blade that Vaness had felt, that nonetheless would only bleed when she removed it. She would have to eventually—Iseult deserved to know the truth about the men who had raised her—but it didn’t feel right to do it so suddenly and in such a setting. With no previous warning, it would be more of a dagger than a needle, and Safi couldn’t bear to be the one wielding it even if she wasn’t the one who had built it. 

She would tell Iseult, but only when they were alone and ready. Then, in spite of the size of their wounds, they would bleed together as Threadsisters should.

In the meantime, she’d leave the needle right where it was and use that burst of pain (which, she thought, must be like the way that a Poisonwitched dart would feel in a shadowed dungeon) to keep herself going. Rabbits ran fastest when they were scared, but she was done with being a frightened rabbit caught in a trap that she should have seen first. She was who she was because of the people who had made her more than that, and whether she liked it or not, they were the same people who had hurt her. 

She was Safiya fon Hasstrel, and she fought hardest when she’d been hurt and still had something worth fighting for.

**Author's Note:**

> This was very angsty so my next one-shot will have to be a crack fic. It's how this works, isn't it?


End file.
